Some Spicy AF Hot Takes

Instead of writing one long opinionated column for the books section, I decided to crowdsource some hella spicy literary hot takes, because it was what everyone wanted and asked for. All of these are real submissions from lots of different people from Facebook, Twitter, or me harassing them at the dinner table every night until they came up with a suggestion.
Disclaimer: I do not talk any responsibility from any injury or illnesses that may arise as a result from reading this column.
• “I’d rather be slowly crushed to death in the giant Hub doors than have to read (or watch) Game of Thrones.”
• “Jodi Picoult should win the 2019 Man Booker Prize.”
• “Haruki Murakami writes better essays than novels, because then he is actually capable of not writing the same theme over and over again.”
• “If you’ve read Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life, you need to call your mother and apologise.”
• “A predictable plot is one of the easiest things to complain about in a novel, but I love them. There’s something rather comforting about starting a book and knowing that by the end the mystery will be solved and the couple will be in love and the world will be saved. It’s the sort of resolution that fiction is for.”
• “I got a free copy of Rupi Kaur’s The Sun and Her Flowers and started to read it, but when I realised that I’m not 16 years old and I’m not on Tumblr anymore, I stopped, re-evaluated my entire life, then recycled it.”

• “Anyone who was a devout Harry Potter fan when they were young is a self important ass with a bad sense of humour now.”
• “Honestly don’t know why fanfiction has such a bad rap. Yeah, it can be weird and gross, but it was what got me into reading as a kid and I have to thank it for that. And just to add: My Immortal is still the greatest piece of literature ever created.”

• “As a fan of dystopian novels, Ben Elton’s Blind Faith is extremely disturbing and gives my much-loved genre a bad name. The relationships are shallow at best and the paranoid anxiety with its theme of personal surveillance oozes with predictability.”
• “Every dude I’ve met who said their favourite books were Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series turned out to be a creep. They might be great books, but this is too much of a coincidence to ignore.”
• “Has anyone actually ever finished The Luminaries?”
• “I don’t have anything to add because I only read good books.”
• “I could eat a can of alphabet soup and shit onto some paper and still write a better novel than most young adult writers.”
• “I bought Infinite Jest over a year ago and it has sat on my bookshelf ever since (and moved house with me twice). It’s an absolute tome and probably one of the most stereotypical books to have on a mid-late 20 year old male’s bookshelf. The recent allegations against David Foster Wallace also make me question the validity of the book and its author, but I’ll get round to finally reading it, controversy or not.”
• And finally, a combined list of authors that people said are overrated or boring: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Emily Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, J. K. Rowling, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, and Albert Camus.
If any of those hot and spicy takes offended you, please shout all comments, queries, and complaints into the void.

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